Mike Stacy's Blog

Outlook Live Meeting Add-in also updated for 64-bit

In a related post to my last one regarding the .83 version of MOC R2 working with 64 bit Outlook, it appears that the Live Meeting Outlook add-in also has 64 bit capability now also.  Thanks to aublumberg for noticing.  Download link is here.

OCS 2007 R2 Live Meeting content fails to download

When running OCS 2007 R2 on Windows 2008, users are able to upload content to the Live Meeting session but receive the following error after the download:

“Content failed to download due to a problem with the Conference Center configuration. Contact your administrator”

To figure out what what happening I decided to browse down into one of the content folders to see if I could load the pages.  To do so I expanded Etc/Place/Null/FileTree/<branch1>/<branch2>/slidefiles in IIS on the front end server and switched to the content view:

Now in the right pane I can see at least a default.htm and an index.html file (if you don’t see these select another <branch2> folder until you find one that contains them), right clicked, and selected the browse option.

Sure enough, that presented a 500.19 error in IE.  An inspection of the IIS logs showed a number of these errors from my testing.

A quick search turned up Jens’ blog which indicates that this problem also manifests itself in the device update URLs.  Applying those steps to the FileTree folder solved the problem (I also did an iisreset for good measure).  One addition to his article – if you are looking for Basic Settings it’s on the far right in the Actions pane when you click on FileTree:

If you don’t see it over there you are probably in the Content View.  To fix this, right click on FileTree and select Switch to features view:

Live Meeting 2007 On-Premises Web Conference Connectivity

I was recently assisting an OCS admin at another company with Live Meeting connectivity issues, during the process of which I explained how Live Meeting connectivity works for on-premises conferences (located on OCS rather than the externally hosted service).  He felt like it was good info so I thought I'd share it.

As you're aware, OCS is SIP based in its communications, with the most obvious SIP client being Communicator 2007.  What is not as obvious is that Live Meeting is also a SIP client.  OCS delivers various pieces of necessary information via SIP, which means that the Live Meeting client must understand how to communicate with OCS over SIP to retrieve the information needed to operate.  This is why if you must specify your OCS Access Edge/pool FQDN rather than your Web Conferencing Edge/internal FQDN if your Live Meeting settings are configured manually (example below).

 

If you think about the infrastructure considers of this for a moment you'll also realize that for users to be able to connect to Live Meetings without any configuration settings you must deploy the necessary SRV records for your pool and Access Edge, even if you have no intention of deploying IM to some or all users (this is a somewhat rare but not entirely unusual request from some customers I've worked with).

So, how does this all come together?  First, the Live Meeting client (hereafter referred to as "LM") queries DNS for the appropriate SRV records of the domain it extracted from the conference location URI.  An example of a conference URI is sip:user@domain.com;gruu;opaque=app:conf:focus:id:1652DEC23E5AE243882614D3B42600B6.  It receives an INFO message back from OCS that contains a variety of information in XML format.  Among this information is the FQDN and port of the Web Conferencing Edge server:

<entry>

<key>proxy[0].FQDN</key>

<value>meetings.evangelyze.net</value>

</entry>

<entry>

<key>proxy[0].Port</key>

<value>443</value>

</entry>

This information is derived from the Web Conferencing properties of the pool:

After this point LM sends a SIP UPDATE message to OCS every 7 minutes to confirm connectivity.  This is one of the reasons why it's important to have your firewall timeouts set properly - unexpectedly disconnecting LM sessions are a somewhat common side effect of improperly set timeout values on the firewall.